You are not Joan Didion.

where were you on January 6th 2024?

Picture this - you have finally managed to use up a notebook cover to cover. You fill it with to-do lists, quick notes, tasks that need to be completed. Perhaps it’s a journal, or something in between and you have chosen the medium of paper, rather than a tweet. Whatever it is, you have completely used this notebook, and you are proud of yourself. Behold - a creased and curling notebook at maximum capacity, full of your own words, all the tasks you have completed and will complete. It is something to be proud of, especially when you place this notebook next to its pristine successor. So you take a photo, and you post it to the internet, perhaps considering the possibility of it going further than your immediate audience, perhaps not even considering the possibility of an audience. Regardless, you want to celebrate this moment. I know I would.

So you post the tweet, go on with your day, but soon the quotes start to flood in. Accusations of performative journalling, whatever that means. Your post is condemned, someone says you have used it as an excuse to brag, how dare you be happy on the internet, in the graveyard that was once Twitter. Someone says there is an ‘essay to be written’ hiding beneath the smooth red exterior of a Muji Passport Memo notebook (amazing taste, by the way) about ‘the commodification of journaling for journaling’s sake as performed introspection in the digital age.’ You don’t have to imagine this scenario, because it has already happened, on numerous occasions. 

This particular example is from a tweet posted on the 6th of January by user bukowskiasagirl (who has kindly given their blessing for this essay to be posted), but you can see similar discourses forming around tweets. I asked some of my closest chronically online friends for examples, and one of them cited the girl who finished a book at 9pm on the 1st of January and unfortunately received masses of hateful quote tweets, while another referenced the now infamous ‘woman tweets that she enjoys sitting in her garden with her husband, drinking coffee and gets accused of being insensitive to sad people’. You can see it in the Booktok discourses on whether people are pretending to enjoy classics, Dostoyevsky’s name dragged through the mud because how could anyone enjoy his writing sincerely? A woman reads a significant number of books, many of which are children’s books and the internet declares her a liar, only for it to be revealed that she logged books she read with her 7-year-old child on Goodreads, hence the large number of children’s books. 

shoutout to my grandma! luv her

I knew exactly where this was going the minute I saw the clunky academic language in boywaif’s tweet. But why is this such a common occurence? Perhaps this onslaught of tweets with the type of language you would only really expect to encounter in an academic journal or a university lecture, accusing strangers on the internet of being bad people over tweets as innocuous as a picture of two notebooks next to each other. Perhaps these strange interactions are an effect of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown skewing our idea of social boundaries irreparably. The fact is, this is an insane thing to accuse someone of but it is something we have grown used to over the internet. Could you imagine this happening in real life?

A: I really like Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, it is really enjoyable.

B: There is an essay to be written about the commodification of 19th Century Russian literature for the purpose of performing intelligence. 

Why can’t someone truly enjoy Anna Karenina, which walked so Penthouse could run? Moreover, is pretending to enjoy something to seem cool really such a heinous crime? Regardless, it is still very strange to accuse a stranger online for doing this, and I can’t be the only one who has noticed a rise in similar accusations. 

As it turns out, boywaif has also posted images of their journalling, except instead of simply the cover they have also posted extracts of their journalling. I’m not insinuating that boywaif is being performative in doing this, but it would make more sense to accuse someone of being performative, of committing the horrific sin of commodifying their journalling habit, when the notebook is open. Except the notebook was closed, and they are still strangers, as am I. 

This is not a dissection of Twitter as a place for discourse. If you want that, I recommend Eliza McLamb’s piece on the very same tweet. I am more concerned with the way platforms like Twitter and Tiktok have warped the ways we approach each other. We have too much access to other people’s lives, simultaneously the consumer and the product. We approach people and their behaviours in ways we would never dream of doing in real life. Where has this come from? Again, this might be due to the pandemic, or perhaps it is a symptom of late stage capitalism, the death rattle of a society in collapse. We have known this since the internet’s earliest days, but the way we interact with others online is unnatural and deeply unhinged. I say we despite the fact that I, like many of my peers, have either grown out of such behaviours or never engaged in them to begin with. I remember one Tiktok that said that we are probably not supposed to be aware that this many people exist, and I find I agree. 

The inherently performative nature of social media, of having a public Twitter or Tiktok, the way we describe ourselves as having a “brand”, of “rebranding” is deeply unsettling when you really sit and think. What could have been a tweet that sought to appreciate the small joys in life instead snowballed into a discourse within a discourse. I guess what I am trying to say is (with love) GO OUTSIDE AND TOUCH SOME GRASS.